In Part 1 of this tutorial, we covered how to configure rsync so we can backup our important files. Now we will use Cron to automate our backup, so we don’t have to worry about remembering!

Have you heard the one about 3-2-1 backups? It’s the idea that you should have 3 copies of your files stored on 2 different mediums and one of the copies should be off-site. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m a little closer now. I have been using rsync, a utility for making incremental backups, for awhile, but I’ve always run the script I created for it manually. I typically did this every three to four weeks, you know when I thought about it. Yesterday I finally created a cron job to automate this process, and it is so much nicer. Read on to learn for yourself how to automate your backups on Linux. Part 1 of this article covers rsync. Part 1a covers include and exclude rules for rsync, and Part 2 covers cron.